RetroClips

Piccadilly gave Anna May Wong one of the only true leading roles a major studio handed a Chinese-American actress in this era, casting her as a scullery maid who becomes a nightclub's sensation. The interracial romance at the story's center was genuinely controversial for 1929, and the film is now regarded as a landmark of early Chinese-American screen representation. Cinematographer Werner Brandes shot the nightclub sequences with a level of Art Deco polish that made this one of the most visually celebrated British silents of its decade, restored decades later by the BFI as a landmark of the era.